So the Nexus 7 is actually available now as of today. For weeks everyone's been talking about Google's $199 tablet like it's going to suddenly demolish the iPad, and I've been sitting here thinking... have these people actually held a 7-inch tablet for more than five minutes?
I get the appeal. I really do. A tablet for under $200 is a good deal on the surface. The Nexus 7 has decent specs: quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8 or 16GB storage, and it's running the latest Android 4.1. The screen's 1280x800, which isn't terrible. And it's genuinely fast because Google didn't load it down with a bunch of OEM bloat. That part's actually refreshing compared to what Samsung and HTC are doing.
But here's the thing everyone's glossing over: seven inches is this weird in-between size that makes the device useful for almost nothing. Your phone's in your pocket. Your laptop's on your desk. The iPad, at 9.7 inches, actually works as a replaceable laptop for light tasks—emails, reading, casual browsing, games. It's big enough that apps are designed to take advantage of the space. You don't feel like you're squinting.
Seven inches is too big to be a phone replacement, too small to be a laptop replacement, and the apps for it? They're still going to be shitty tablet apps in portrait mode because developers have spent the last two years optimizing for iPad. Google could have a processor faster than an iPhone and it won't matter if Instagram still looks like it was designed for a phone stretched sideways.
The price is aggressive and that matters, I'll admit. $199 gets people interested. But undercutting the iPad on price while shipping a device that's worse at doing everything the iPad does isn't a strategy—it's a math problem Google thought they could just throw money at. Apple owns this space because the 9.7-inch form factor actually works. It's not some accident.
I'm also not thrilled about the Google Play ecosystem for tablets. Apple's app store has a thousand dedicated tablet apps. Good ones. Optimized ones. Google Play has... what, a handful? A few games. Some stuff that scales okay. The rest is just stretched phone apps that look like they belong in 2009.
Look, I'm not saying the Nexus 7 is a bad product for the money. If you have exactly $199 burning a hole and you want something to read books on or watch videos during a flight, fine. It does that. But this narrative that it's going to crack the iPad's dominance is nonsense. Market share for small tablets won't move the needle against iPad's install base and developer support. And honestly, if you're spending money on a tablet, just save the extra $100 and get something that actually excels at what tablets are supposed to do.
What really bugs me is that we're treating cheaper as inherently better. Sometimes a more expensive product that does something well beats a cheaper product that does everything badly. The iPad's been the same price for two years. Instead of arguing about whether people will trade their iPad for a smaller device with a worse app store, why isn't anyone asking why the 7-inch tablet even exists as a form factor?
Anyway. The Nexus 7 ships today if you're into that kind of thing.